


going against my nature to help

by bleepblorp



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Introspection, Post-Dragon Age: Inquisition Quest - Wicked Eyes and Wicked Hearts, Present Tense, the duchess in a box war table operation, which is supposed to be funny and i use it for angst instead
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-10
Updated: 2020-08-10
Packaged: 2021-03-05 22:47:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,325
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25813051
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bleepblorp/pseuds/bleepblorp
Summary: “Perhaps,” Josephine says, tone hesitant, her chin tucked against her chest. “I should speak with him?”Leliana shakes her head. “I will handle it.”Cullen deflates, shoulders sagging in relief. “Oh thank the Maker, he listens to you.”Adaar has been... different since they got back from Halamshiral. Leliana uses every agent at her disposal to fix it.
Relationships: EXCEPT - Relationship, Inquisitor & Leliana (Dragon Age), Past Leliana/ Female Amell, romantic relationships hinted at but this aint about them
Kudos: 11





	going against my nature to help

**Author's Note:**

> after my adaar specialized as an assassin i had... thoughts about how similar he and Leliana were. then i had more. and then this happened.
> 
> Anyways, this is the "Gaspard as brialas puppet" scenario

“I had always assumed,” Adaar says, voice carefully light. “That death would be the end, but is a crate and continued humiliation what awaits us all? Inform the Chantry that we have discovered proof of life after death.”

Cullen frowns, opening his mouth to reprimand Adaar, and Josie tries to hide her amusement behind her big feathery quill. “Unfortunately,” she says. “For the Orlesian nobility, death, much like marriage and birth, is a deeply political thing.”

Adaar sighs, pressing his knuckles to his temple and closing his eyes. “Right, of course. Well, we have a dead duchess at our disposal now.” He sounds dubious, as though it hadn’t been _his_ decision to recruit Florianne’s still warm corpse. The delirious joke of a man on the brink of collapse after a very stressful week as it may have been, it was still an official decision. “How do we use this to make our point?”

“Wave her head on a pike in front of the rest of them?” Cullen suggests. When no one laughs and instead, Josephine takes a studious note, he sighs. “Please, don’t actually do that.”

“Make an example of her,” Josephine suggests. “Highly publicized event.”

Adaar hums thoughtfully. “Leliana?”

It seems as though every meeting goes like this; he politely listens to whatever Cullen or Josephine have to say then immediately turns to her. There is a sense of inevitability in his eyes every time she offers a solution, like he already knows hers is the only real option.

Diplomacy and force are the strengths of others. They can each play at both, but ultimately they know real power lies elsewhere.

She feels her lips quirk. “I think a more personal touch might be in order. A night time visit from the late Duchess might cow them sufficiently.” Brutal, but far more subtle, and a suggestion she knows will amuse Adaar.

Adaar, proving her right, smiles. The smile is a little bit off, however, a little too sharp, a little too forced. That smile would normally have been riotous laughter, leaving Cullen staring at both of them, disgusted and aghast.

“Wait,” Cullen cuts in. “Can we go back to the head on a pike? I think that might actually be less barbaric.”

Adaar ignores him, and shares a look with Leliana, and she thinks of Halamshiral.

The shared look, the silent acknowledgement of what needed to be done.

“I’ve had enough coddling nobility to last me a lifetime,” Adaar says, and there is a bite to his words that usually doesn’t make an appearance among his advisors. “Yes, Josie,” he says before she can say anything to correct him. “I know there will be more of that in my future, but for now, let them remember who put their emperor in power and how.”

Watching Adaar, soft, quick-witted Adaar, and watching the Inquisitor, collected, unaffected, _ruthless_ , Leliana thinks as he leaves the war room, back upright and hands clenching into fists and loosening again by his sides, is like watching two different people.

There’s more of the Inquisitor in Adaar now; he’s a little colder, a little harder. The sharp wit that had always, among friends, manifested as quips to lighten the mood or gentle teasing, is more frequently coming out as the forked barbs he lobs at his enemies, or the backhanded compliments he gives self-important despots they need to play nice with.

Both of these had made him a hit with the Orlesian court, effortlessly portraying the dashing, eloquent, rebellious spirit they hadn’t known they’d wanted.

“You’re a terror _,”_ Josephine had told him, pulling him aside after his fraught dance with the duchess, looking more exhilarated than Leliana had seen her in years. “Don’t change a thing. They are eating it up _._ ”

He’d smiled back at her, but his eyes had been blank.

Leliana remembers being a bard, the feeling of being ornamental, there for decoration and amusement as much as for anything else. To be so dangerous and yet viewed as nothing more than a curiosity, a plaything.

She understands the urge to remind them how easily you could destroy them all.

“Perhaps,” Josephine says, tone hesitant, her chin tucked against her chest. “I should speak with him?”

Leliana shakes her head. “I will handle it.”

Cullen deflates, shoulders sagging in relief. “Oh thank the Maker, he _listens_ to you.”

* * *

She goes to Varric first.

She knows that, out of everyone, Varric must have noticed, and he has been one of the few always sure to pull Adaar off that pedestal when he needs it.

“I don’t know, Nightingale,” he says, running a hand across his face, his eyes tired and with several new lines around them; these past few months have aged all of them. “I’ll see what I can do.”

She likes that he has given her a nickname, like he has everyone else, but she wishes it were a different one.

But that’s exactly why she is here, asking him. The little things he does to pull them all back into themselves, remind them who they are beyond the Inquisition.

His smile is a little self-deprecating, his shoulders slumped, and her heart sinks.

She watches him drag Adaar into a game of cards, out for drinks, pulling him aside to get his thoughts on his latest chapter.

Adaar does a good job faking it, but he is still detached. Cold.

Nothing really changes.

* * *

She goes to the Iron Bull next.

She likes being around Bull, despite what he may think. His shamelessness and open demeanor makes her smile, just like Zevran used to, and the way he is with his men reminds her of her time with Amell: rambunctious and lighthearted despite the looming horror. She had always made camp feel like home, no matter where they were. Like family.

Even after all this time, and despite her best efforts, thinking about her still makes Leliana’s heart squeeze.

Bull has made a home here. Leliana hopes Adaar will feel that warmth, just as she does.

“Red!” He calls out. “Let me buy you a drink.”

She settles next to him, taking miniscule sips of the, frankly, horrific ale.

She likes bad beer now. It reminds her of the bright spots of happiness between the pressing threat of the blight, with light and laughter and warm skin on hers. Amell always drank a little too much, on those nights, never knowing her limits after being locked away her entire life in the circle. She never learned, no matter how much Zevran teased or Wynne chided.

At the end of the night, when, knowing spark bright in her dark eyes, she would take Leliana back to her tent, her sweet, sloppy kisses tasted of this.

She sets her mug down.

“I need your help,” she says and Bull breaks into a grin.

“Spymaster to spymaster?” He asks, looking thrilled at the prospect. “Thought you’d never ask.”

“You never showed any interest,” she counters.

He shrugs, taking her comment in stride. “I’m retired anyway, just didn’t wanna get rusty. So, what can I do for you?”

“It’s about Adaar,” she says and silently catalogues every change in his body language at the name.

Leliana does her best to give the Inquisitor his privacy, but there is only so much she can keep from knowing.

Bull, much like Varric, has made a consistent effort to keep Adaar tethered, grounded, though his techniques are less than refined.

“You are good for him,” she says, noting the dip of his shoulders with a frown, before they go loose in an approximation of relaxation. “You always manage to cheer him up, take him out of his head. He needs that right now.”

“Of course I can help,” Bull booms out, almost clapping her on the shoulder before thinking better of it and playing off the motion by grandly reaching for his drink. “I owe Adaar everything, the least I can do is kick his ass until he feels better.”

She frowns.

Something here has changed as well.

Bull is something close to fragile, now, unmoored and unsure after being summarily kicked out of the only life he’d ever known. Adaar had been the one to offer him port in the storm, had given him a home, if he wanted it.

When someone has given you everything you thought you could not have, it becomes difficult not to deify them.

She is intimately familiar with the predicament, but it is far from helpful.

If she wants someone who can take Adaar off his pedestal, she has come to the wrong place.

* * *

Sera laughs in her face.

Which is why she had not been Leliana’s first choice. While Sera tends to bring out Adaar’s more playful side, and while she obviously cares a great deal about him, she lacks the emotional nuance to _talk_ about what is happening to him.

But she is glad to see them with their heads together over drinks, giggling and conspiring, though it will no doubt cause nothing but trouble for everyone else.

However, only a few days later, she sees him storming out of her room, expression blank.

* * *

“So you want me to just… spend more time with him?” Dorian confirms, every elegant motion of his hands as he speaks displaying practiced carelessness. “I am… unpracticed in the art of friendship, have I _not_ been spending enough time with him? We are quite busy, as I am sure your highly trained eye has noted.”

“You’re doing just fine,” she assures, trying to soothe the insecurity beyond the bluster. “But precisely because he is so busy, he needs a reminder that we still want him here.” _Want,_ she says, not need. _Him_ , she says, Adaar not the Inquisitor.

Dorian’s eyes go big and sad and solemn with understanding. “Yes, alright.” His mouth twitches and his words go sardonic, but his eyes remain the same. “Nothing like losing repeatedly at chess to bring one back down to earth, eh?”

“I’m sure he lets you win most of those, Dorian,” Leliana says.

Dorian scoffs. “There’s no way, I’d know. He can’t lie to me.” He pauses and really looks at her, scrutinizing her implacable smile. “Can he?”

Leliana continues to smile and turns to go.

“ _Can_ he?”

* * *

She is reluctant to go to Cassandra for help in this.

For all that Cassandra watches him with stars in her eyes, Leliana wonders if she will ever see him as anything other than the Herald, something he was really never meant to be.

Leliana cannot push her on this. Adaar will have to be the one to show her for himself.

* * *

Cole comes to her, instead.

“He is used to working in the shadows,” he says from up in the rafters. “He doesn’t know how to be when everyone is watching.”

“Hello, Cole,” she says. “Would you like to say hello to the birds?”

He doesn’t come down. “Birds are afraid of me now. They fly away when I get close.”

Her mouth quirks. “Mine are far too polite to do such a thing.”

He carefully clambers down and she calls over Bean, her most sweet tempered raven, and lets Cole trace the crown of her head, a look of wonder on his face. “She is like us,” he says. “Cloaked in darkness, nothing but sharp edges, going against her nature to help.”

“I suppose that’s one way of looking at it,” Leliana says. She’s always liked ravens, beyond their usefulness to her. They are intelligent, curious, characteristics she admires in people. She wonders if it is the same kinship Cole feels.

“He took me out of the darkness,” Cole says quietly, not taking his eyes off the bird. “When he knows how hard it is for us to exist out in the light.”

Leliana hums. “Do you wish he hadn’t?”

Cole shakes his head. “I like it here. But he doesn’t. He’s retreating, he goes further away the more people watch, the more people look at him. But there is nowhere to go, no way to disappear with all those eyes, so he’s hiding within himself.”

“I know,” Leliana says.

“The hiding doesn’t make him any happier,” Cole continues. “It is just easier.”

“I know.”

Cole looks up at her, eyes big under the wide brim of his hat, gaze piercing. “He looks up to you.”

She feels a laugh burble out of her chest and Bean mimics the sound. “Why would he do that?”

“You are how he sees his future,” Cole says. “He thinks you are so much alike already, more suited to working behind the scenes, ruthless when you need to be, both with so much violence in your pasts, so much you sometimes wonder if you can ever move past it. He likes it when he makes you laugh because it means he can still laugh. That there will be a future for him where he can still laugh. He likes hearing about your nugs, likes hearing you talk about Amell. Makes him think that all the softness in his heart will stay there, even when he feels empty.”

Her heart begins to sink.

Cole doesn’t stop, almost as though compelled to speak. “And when you go cold and distant, it makes him afraid. Afraid that the cold he already feels seeping through him will take root and he will never be able to pull it out. He feels as though the winter palace was the point of no return. He thinks he’s broken.”

Leliana feels sick. Wants to tell him to stop, but cannot bring herself to.

“I don’t know how to help him,” Cole finishes, quietly.

“Me neither,” Leliana says.

They don’t look each other in the eye.

“Do you want to help me feed the birds?” She asks. It is an old trick, for when she feels cold and hopeless, that a small act of kindness can trick her into thinking she is still good. That she can still do good without any collateral.

“Yes,” Cole says immediately, and pulls breadcrumbs from his pocket.

“You came prepared, I see,” she says, feeling a little bit of warmth return to her at the sight.

He shrugs, absorbed in his task. “Hopeful.” He smiles slightly. “I like hope.”

* * *

She slits Natalie’s throat and feels nothing. It had to be done, to protect the Inquistion, everything they had worked for.

She wipes off her blade and turns to see Adaar’s face, frozen in fear.

Not of her, never of her. She is a weapon, and Adaar is not the type of man to fear the weapon he wields.

No. His eyes are asking a question. _Is this what I become?_

He is afraid of the answer.

* * *

“Am I to understand that everyone pestering me this week is your doing?”

Leliana freezes, ink dripping to blot her message. She sighs and sets it aside. It will have to be rewritten later. “I suppose I should have been prepared for this. A worker is only as good as his tools.”

Adaar rolls his eyes and comes to rest beside her, leaning back against the railing. He doesn’t seem angry, but that is part of the problem. He doesn’t seem much of anything lately. “I believe the phrase is actually, ‘it is a poor worker that blames his tools’. You had an ex Ben-Hassrath agent on your side and you still got caught.”

“Are you going to give Bull my job?” She asks, quirking an eyebrow.

He snorts. “No one can do your job, you know that.”

“Well,” she says, pushing her chair back from the table and crossing her arms. “Thank the Maker for that.”

Adaar is watching her quizzically, head cocked the way her ravens look when they think she is hiding food from them. “What is this about Leliana?”

She sighs. She supposes that if you want a job done right, you have to do it yourself. “Halamshiral.”

She feels more than sees the way his shoulders go stiff, his whole body going entirely still, like a cobra before the strike. When he speaks, his voice is calm and smooth, betraying none of his wariness. He is very, very good. “What about Halamshiral?”

“What indeed?” She parrots back at him.

He gives her an unimpressed, silent look.

She does not blink.

Ultimately he is the one to break. “I don’t feel guilty about letting Celene die, if that’s what you’re suggesting.”

“It is not,” she says. No doubt everybody has been suggesting that. “But something about her death has been bothering you, has it not?”

His shoulders slump and he looks away. “I’ve killed a lot of people. I’m very good at it, but this was, I think, the first time I stood aside and watched somebody die like that, knowingly, intentionally and for my own purposes. It felt. Cold. I didn’t know it was something I was capable of.”

Leliana nods. “And now you do.”

“And now I do,” Adaar repeats, sounding exhausted. “I don’t like what I’m discovering about myself. Have I become so detached that I can do something like that and feel nothing?”

“You did what had to be done, and you did it for the right reasons,” Leliana says, even though she knows it will not help. “Because of you, Orlais is in the hands of someone who will uplift the downtrodden.”

Adaar laughs, the sound airy and bitter. “If that is the case, perhaps I should have killed Celene myself. That may have made me feel better about the whole thing.”

“You are more than an assassin now,” Leliana tells him. “You cannot always be the one to swing the blade.”

Adaar winces at that. “You’re always right, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” she says, coy smirk playing at the corner of her mouth. “That is why I am your favorite advisor.”

He smiles down at her, a little roguish, teasing. Back on solid ground. “Don’t tell Cullen, he’ll be devastated."

“Secrets are my trade, Inquisitor,” she says, knowingly.

“Now, why doesn’t that comfort me?” He asks, mouth twitching.

 _Because you understand,_ she thinks. _Because we are the same_. “Adaar,” she says. “What I am now,” she pauses. “It is not the only way for someone like us to be.”

His mouth forms a perfect _O_ of surprise, but no words come out.

“Do not be afraid to do what is necessary,” she continues, and thinks about Amell. “But come home, after it all.”

Adaar bites his lip, his doe eyes big as he looks down at her. Every line of his body has been sharpened by years of training and fighting, but his eyes remain soft and warm. “You once told me it makes it easier, to romanticize it all, the shadows, the secrets.”

She nods.

“Is that what you do?”

“I used to,” she says. “It was easy to do, coming from the light into the shadows. There is a certain freedom to the dark that drew me in.”

“And now?” Adaar prompts her when she falls quiet.

“Now,” she continues. “I am in line to become Divine. There is no position that could be farther from the shadows.”

Adaar hums and looks up to the ceiling. “Then you and I will be in the same boat.”

“All eyes on us,” she agrees. “Let’s give them a show, yes?”

“It’s a lucky thing we’re both so pretty,” he says and the smile he gives her when she laughs lights up his eyes. “I’ll let you get back to work,” he says, the corner of his mouth soft and his dark eyes sweet. “I—” he hesitates before steeling himself to continue. “Thank you.”

He doesn’t wait for a response, just turns and leaves.

She reaches for her abandoned memo and stalls.

She leaves it where it is and instead reaches for a fresh sheet.

 _My dearest Zevran,_ she begins, letting the old warmth bloom in her chest.

Perhaps she, too, should come home, after it all.


End file.
